You do not want to think about your sister. You do not want to follow the trail that thinking about your sister leads. You suggest to your boys that they leave Tomorrowland, and they agree readily. They find it boring. This vision of the future has come and gone before their birth.
So you wander around for a few more hours, scooting backwards down a tame roller coaster away from Norwegian trolls, and floating in a gondola through faux Venetian canals. You eat at a Mexican restaurant that serves macaroni and cheese, and then lick sloppy ice cream cones at a sidewalk cafe. At both these stops, and at a third one at a bench by the artificial beach, you feed the baby a bottle and change her diaper. Switching over to bottle feeding has relieved your guilt at transmitting drugs to your baby, but still you feel a sense of loss. Bit by bit, even your youngest, your only daughter, inevitably grows away from you.
By late afternoon she is fast asleep in her stroller and the boys are asleep on their feet, stunned by sensation. Pluto walks by waving his paws at them, and they barely raise their eyes. They tell you they want to go back to the hotel and watch cartoons. The one with the sensitive stomach tells you his tummy feels sad. You ask him if he needs to throw up and he says no, but you can’t rely on his assurance, so you duck into the nearest lady’s room, which, like the rest of the park, is sparkling clean. You stand with him in the toilet stall for a few minutes without incident. Slowly, color returns to his face. You make sure the boys pee anyway, and as they play around with the soap squirter and the electric hand dryer you realize how exhausted you are yourself. Your two hours of sleep the night before plus all those hours driving and walking are catching up with you. Your head weighs heavy on your shoulders. A crevasse opens up in the base of your belly. A feeling of dread, so at odds with the exhilaration that’s been rippling through your bones, creeps out from wherever it has been hiding.
You know how to make all this go away. The solution is right there in your baby’s diaper bag, hanging on the handle of your stroller. But the opportunity isn’t. You have no television to park your boys in front of, no orange-scented showers to retreat to. You contemplate leaving them alone briefly, as they continue to squirt pink soap out of the dispensers, but you know that they will sense your absence, panic and bolt or scream, or both.
A heavy woman with one platinum blond baby on her hip and another, slightly older, one in a stroller, pushes her way into the restroom and smiles at you empathetically. “Tired, huh?” she says. At first you view her with scorn. She is probably younger than you but she already looks worn out. Her pink pantsuit is hideous. It looks like something your sister would choose if she bought her outfits at Penney’s instead of Saks. Her hair is dyed an amalgam of three shades and has a bald spot near the crown. Her abdomen loosely flops over her waistband, as if it bore no relationship to her smallish saggy breasts above or her squat legs below. Her kids are wearing cheap polyester outfits that are miniature versions of her own. Her triceps shake as she repositions the baby and a huge sack bulging with diapers, clothes, and snacks hangs from her wrist. “What beautiful twins,” she continues, and it shames you that, while you’ve been mentally ripping her to pieces, she’s been admiring you. What a nice lady, so kind. A woman you can trust. A moment later you seize your opportunity.
“Would you mind watching them for a minute?” you ask. “I really have to go to the bathroom.”
“Why sure, honey,” she says. “I know how that goes.”
One of your boys, the one with the sensitive stomach, reminds you that he isn’t supposed to talk to strangers. You assure him that this time it is okay, that the lady is a nice mommy, the same as you.
You push open the green door to the stall, grabbing the diaper bag as you go. “I need some Tampax,” you say.
“You don’t have to explain nothing to me,” she assures you in a silky Southern drawl. “Say hello to the nice boys, Sandra,’ she says as her towheaded daughter pulls at your boy’s shirts.
There’s something about snorting the coke behind the metal restroom stall, balancing everything on the diaper bag resting on your knee, your left thigh brushing up against the base of the toilet, that strikes you as ugly and depraved, in a way that doing the same thing in your orange-scented hotel bathroom, or your own powder room with the blue checked wallpaper, or even cross-legged on Nick Stromboli’s grungy carpet, does not. For the first time the word “addict” flits across your mind, but you dismiss it. You are a very functional person. You eat (well, sometimes), you sleep (well, sometimes), you feed and clothe four children and shepherd them to all their activities and appointments, you arrange for the carpet to be cleaned, you excel at step aerobics. Your triceps muscles are firm and rounded. You feel fine. You feel finer than fine.
You feel so fine by the time you step out of that restroom stall that the kind woman asks you if you are “better” now. You assure her yes, thanking her, and she tells you how she and her husband just love Disney, they save for this trip every year. Your boys are sucking on Mickey Mouse lollipops from her gargantuan sack and chasing her little girl around the restroom. Searching madly in your bag for some form of repayment, you uncover a box of crayons you’d brought for the airplane, forgotten, still in their wrapper. You hand them to the little girl.
“Don’t forget your thank yous, Sandra,” admonishes the lady, but you are already retreating.
Outside, on the paths, early evening melts into twilight. You keep walking even though the boys are on the verge of collapse and even the baby has awakened from her deep nap and started in with a low wail that neither bottle nor binky can soothe. Fireworks explode over a castle turret in streaks of purple and red. You don’t want to leave until the fireworks are over, until they are locking the gates to the park. You tell yourself your mother would feel the same way. You paid sixty dollars for a pass for the whole day and you should get your money’s worth. Your Mom brought you up to believe in value. You can picture her saying, if she found out about the coke: “A hundred dollars, Rikki, and poof, it’s gone? A hundred dollars for only one day?”
Eventually, you follow the throngs to the parking lot. By the time you edge out onto the highway, the kids are asleep. Past Orlando, the roads are empty except for the occasional truck. Little is visible beyond the road except the shadows of buildings and the glow of neon. Out beyond the shadows, people are sleeping, snoring under the hum of their air conditioning, missing out on these clear warm nights, these unrecoverable hours of their lives. But not you. You sing along to Robert Palmer and Phil Collins. Your voice has improved, you think, tuneful and strong. Maybe you should sing with a rock band. It is not too late. Surely you are as talented as those girls with the tight black skirts on MTV. While your entire life is spent running around, all you do is run in circles. You wish you could power yourself past the inertia that glues you to the track. On nights, like this, you feel so close. Your eyes, sharp as a laser, follow the white line in front of you, extending, it seems, all the way to the Caribbean, hurtling off the edge of the earth. But try as you might, you never become one with the line. Inevitably, as you drive forward, the line recedes.
The next day is your last full one in Florida. The boys nag you to go to the pool but you call the real estate agent’s number instead. You don’t know exactly why. The woman who meets you in the lobby is named Constance, and she tells you in that melodic Southern drawl that she specializes in corporate relocations. She wears a pink pantsuit not unlike the lady in the bathroom at Disney World but more expensive, better fitting, and accessorized by a sapphire pendant on a gold chain.
You drive down wide flat streets smelling of freshly laid tar. The houses are spanking new and humongous, spiraling along the curves and cul-de-sacs. Every few feet, a spindly infant palm tree juts out from the rubbery grass.
Inside, the hallways are tiled with white marble. The kitchens have center islands, Sub-Zero refrigerators, and Jenn-Air grills and open up onto concrete patios with kidney-shaped
pools. The master suite adjoins a bathroom the size of your childhood bedroom, with Jacuzzis and steam nozzles and plate-glass windows that overlook the neighbors’ Jacuzzis. You have never seen so much luxury in a family home, not even the nouveau mansions your mother drags you to see in Old Westbury. Here, the amenities have amenities. There are home theaters and climate control and central vacuuming.
These houses do not have phones yet. They are as pristine as newborn babies. You feel like you could wander forever through their rooms, always opening a new door.
The boys tell your husband about the houses as soon as he walks into your hotel room. You are slipping on your new clingy black dress, fresh from an orange-scented shower. Over your Singapore Slings and coconut-encrusted mahimahi, he questions you about the houses, wanting your opinion of the Jenn-Air grills and entertainment centers, wondering if you’ve checked out the school system. You fill him in, but already the end of your vacation in Florida looms up before you like a black wall. The houses already seem unreal, like something you’ve seen in a dream, and indeed, you will dream about them day after day and question what they represent. Your handsome husband reaches across the table and holds your hand and looks at you with that wondrous rapt attention he bestows on you from time to time. He is tired. His forehead is developing thin lines you never noticed before. For some reason, this small revelation of weakness fills you with tenderness. You squeeze his hand back. You realize your hand is hot and sweaty and you are dizzy, perhaps from the drinks or the accumulated fatigue of a week of driving or simply your nerve endings firing way too fast. You still love him with a painful intensity that feels like you’ve wrapped your body around glowing coals. You wonder why you can’t speak as freely with him as you do with the slobby Nick Stromboli, with whom stray thoughts and stories spill out of you as you waste your mornings cross-legged on his grubby carpet. Where you have to check your watch repeatedly to remind yourself you have to pick up your boys from school. Where your baby daughter puts God knows what into her mouth.
Afterward you take one last, long, luxurious and fragrant shower. You use up the rest of your Ziploc bag, so there will be no reason to worry at the airport. There’s not much left, anyway. You lie awake next to your snoring husband—that is a new habit of his, the snoring—and watch the sky outside your balcony window. The hotel has turned off all the lights, so the sea turtles can nest, and the sky is flush with stars. You slide open the screen doors and breathe deeply. You wonder how anyone can waste their hours sleeping in a place where the night breezes, soft as a cashmere shawl, ripple over your skin.
You glance at the silent phone. At home the phone rings constantly on both lines. But in the hotel, the phone has not rung, except for nightly calls from your nine-year-old son. He has told you about his math test, the tennis game he lost, and the Yankees game his friend’s parents are taking him to. He sounds content. Your parents have not called, nor your sister. You are vaguely surprised not to hear from any of them, but relieved. If there was anything really wrong, you would know. You gave them your number. They would call.
You bask in the lies exemplified by the silent phone because maybe even then you know you are in the eye of the hurricane. In a few hours you will be sucked back into the maelstrom. You will desperately try to conjure up the slow slap of the waves on the beach, this smell of salt and diesel oil, the orange-blossom scent of your hotel bathroom, the white stripes of the empty highway, the stars and the soft breezes.
You hold your husband’s hand again in the cab on the way to the airport. You lean your head against his shoulder. Tired as he might be, you are more tired. The boys are fighting in the backseat, but you don’t have the energy to deal with it. Already the sun is rising high in the hazy sky.
At the airport, the flashing screens announce hundreds of possible destinations: Antigua, Rio de Janeiro, Palm Springs, Frankfurt. You could fly to any of these places. People do. All you have to is board the plane. But you are busy giving your baby a zwieback to teethe on and resolving your boys’ tug-of-war over a robot Transformer. Your husband picks up a Wall Street Journal. Your head feels like sludge, and you’ve got weird bloating gas pains in your abdomen. Soon your options narrow down to one, the destination typed on your ticket: La Guardia Airport, New York City. You board the plane and fly home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Our cabdriver was a complete space cadet,” Erica told Nick, sitting cross-legged on his carpet. A yellow crust clung to one of the shaggy strands—dried cheese? She picked it off with her finger, getting flakes of the gross substance beneath her fingernail. She couldn’t believe this was how she was spending her first morning back, given all the laundry and shopping to do, the mail to pick up at the post office, the phone calls to return. Yet there she was, babbling her head off.
“He said he’d never been on a plane in his life. He kept asking what it was like, way up high in the clouds. And he couldn’t find the expressway. Can you believe it? How could a cabdriver not know how to get on the expressway? We ended up taking Northern Boulevard. And then he started blabbing about how Northern Boulevard was the highway to hell.”
“Man, what was he on?” Nick sat across from her, on the other side of the coffee table.
“Beats me,” Erica said. “His brain cells were fried.” She attempted to maneuver herself into a lotus position but could only manage one leg up on her thigh. As she twisted her waist, Sophia scooted on her tummy toward Nick’s kitchen, propelling herself by pushing up on her arms and then sliding forward. Erica scooped her up and attempted to interest her in Nick’s telephone. Sophia poked at the buttons a few times before scooting off toward the kitchen linoleum again. Even from ten feet away, Erica could see that that floor hadn’t been cleaned in months. Maybe years.
“You ever wash your kitchen floor, Nick?” she asked.
Nick looked offended. “Every few months I do a deep cleaning,” he said.
“Can you turn on Sesame Street?” Erica waved a cloth octopus in front of Sophia’s face, watching her intently track its passage from right to left.
“Sure,” Nick said. “What channel?”
“How could you not know it’s on PBS?”
“Because I never watch it, Mommy,” Nick chortled in a tone Erica knew she should find infuriating but decided to let go. She got up and turned the television on herself. Big Bird’s sunny yellow presence floated into the room, momentarily transfixing Sophia into glazed-eye immobility and freeing Erica to continue her story.
“So, anyway, I actually flagged this cabdriver down because he looked American. I figured he would be more reliable than some Russian without a license. And when we finally get home, we picked up Dylan and Sammy—God, that animal’s grown into a monster—and I’m dead tired, but Ethan gets the bright idea we should all play soccer in the park. He wanted to maximize his Monday off. That’s exactly how he put it. Like maximizing corporate profits or something.” She picked the cheese fragments out of her nail, just as she noticed an ant scurrying along the knotted base of the carpet. She imagined how the carpet must look from an ant’s perspective, all tall, waving, multicolored vines.
“You should replace this shag carpeting,” she said. “It’s even older than your record albums.”
“Ethan’s an athletic sort, is he not?” Nick asked, blowing his nose with one of the tissues that always seemed to be dangling from his pockets. “I’ve been running at the track myself, trying to get into shape.” He patted the bulge of his belly. He was better dressed than usual: jeans, though with tissues hanging out; a tucked-in pinstripe shirt; matching socks.
“How can you be so chubby when you do coke?” Erica asked. “I’ve been losing weight like crazy.” She patted her belly button where it poked up out of the top of her jeans, the rest of her belly hard and flat as a teenager’s. She was wearing a thin cotton scoop-neck T-shirt, the first item she’d grabbed from the top of her Florida suitcase, and even in Ni
ck’s overheated living room, in the second week of June, she shivered. A flannel shirt, red-yellow-and-gray plaid, jutted out from a pile of clothes at the end of the couch. She put it on. It felt warm and soft, smelling of coffee and smoke.
“I don’t do nearly as much coke as you do, honey,” Nick was saying. “And I’m not nearly as urgent about it. Like, you had to come over this morning, first thing, or the world was going to end. I do have a business to run, you know.”
“You can’t have half as much to do as me,” Erica said. “I haven’t even checked my phone messages yet. We played soccer at the park yesterday, like I said, and then we came home and ordered a pizza, and by the time I’d bathed the kids, and gone over Dylan’s homework with him, and done stories and bedtime, I fell sound asleep. I fell asleep in Jesse and Jake’s bed, as a matter of fact. I haven’t even called Debbie yet. I haven’t even called my mom. Of course, nothing’s stopping them from calling me. They know I’m back.” She rolled back into a plough position. Thirty-one years old, and she could still touch her toes to the floor.
“Well, you know about Jared, right?” Nick asked.
She unfolded from the plough so sharply that she felt a stab of pain in her lower back. For a split second, her vision faded to black. When her sight returned, she was lying flat on the ground, and Nick’s face hovered over her so closely she could see a red irritation on his upper lip. He’d slid over to her side of the table and was lying next to her, propped up on his elbows.
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